Turpentine

Jacob Tobias Harley of Eustis occasionally talks on l9th century Florida history, revealing some things most of us didn't know.For example, he says that in Florida in the 1800s, jobs were so scarce that white people sold themselves as virtual slaves in exchange for a sum of money given to the families they left behind. They accomplished this through indenture, a contract binding one person to work for another for a given period of time - which is not legal today. The period of indenture was usually nine years.

EUSTIS -- Secluded under a canopy of oaks, Elaine Renick paused next to a bush of splashy purple American beauty berries and gazed at the shimmery sapphire waters of Lake May. "Something about this touches you -- or it doesn't," the county commissioner mused. Oh, yes. Walking on a trail around Lake May is like strolling back into history. One stumbles on a movie-set-perfect cabin once used to distill turpentine -- and during Prohibition, family legend has it, some more stimulating types of spirits.

More than three years of arguments about who should preserve an old turpentine still will end next month with a celebration by a historical group that won permission to keep the relic.The Barberville Pioneer Settlement for the Creative Arts will dedicate the still with a luncheon at the group's headquarters near the intersection of U.S. Highway 17 and State Road 40. The celebration will be 12:15 to 1:15 p.m. June 16.The still was moved about a month ago from its original site west of Daytona Beach.

Bits of blue glass shining up from the gray sand. A long shank of rusted iron. And three wooden posts, plunked in the middle of palmettos so plentiful they could weave a road to the moon. If most people even saw this stuff, hidden in piney wetland that's now owned by the University of Central Florida, they wouldn't give it a second glance. But most people aren't Bob Putnam of Winter Springs, who for years knew those woods like a good friend. When in August he met Connie Lester, newly arrived to the UCF history department, he asked, "I wonder if you'd be interested in what I think is a historic site."

At the turn of the century, the Markham and Sylvan Lake areas were peppered with turpentine distilleries and sawmills.Not far off was the steamboat landing at Wilson's Corner, a wharf at the site of today's Port of Sanford on the St. Johns River.From the landing, turpentine, resin, pitch and tar - the so-called ''naval stores'' - were shipped. The term ''naval stores'' came from the primary use of the pine products as caulking materials, solvents and sealants on wooden ships.Dana Ste. Claire, curator of science at the Daytona Beach Museum of Arts and Science, said Central Florida's dense forests spawned a healthy pine-wood turpentine industry in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

As a teen-ager growing up during the Great Depression, George Dewey Clanton Jr. thought he could earn some quick money by joining his father's turpentine crews in the longleaf pine forests along Taylor Creek.Once, when he was 14 or 15 and wanted to earn some money, his father said he could collect 11 buckets of pine gum to fill one barrel.''I dipped five buckets full and I made a deal with the man whose area I was dipping in that I would give him all the money, he could keep it all, if he would just go ahead and finish it and let me out of it.''He would have earned a dollar if he could have kept up with the other chippers and dippers for a full day's work.

At first glance, the scars on the old pines look like signs of lightning strikes or fire damage. A more trained eye recognizes the cat-faced markings as the work of turpentine chippers who sliced gashes to open pine bark and hacked into the trees to draw out the gummy sap. Some trees in the remote Forever Florida nature preserve south of Holopaw still bear the markings at their base from the turpentine workers' tools. Elsewhere in the scrub forest, fragments of terra-cotta pottery once used to collect pine sap can still be found near the bases of some larger trees.

Explorers of Volusia County's immense pine forests may occasionally encounter unusual pieces or piles of terra-cotta pottery, most often near the bases of larger trees.They might wonder how these ''plant pot'' fragments got there. The scatterings of old clay pots are not a careless hiker's litter, but rather artifacts of an industry from Florida's past - the pinewood turpentine business.For years, from the 1880s to the early 1900s, the sap of the large pines was collected and processed into turpentine, resin, pitch and tar. These were products of the ''naval stores'' industry, so named because they were used primarily for caulking and rigging on early wooden ships.

Orange County's turpentine industry exploited laborers and ravaged the landscape for several decades in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Extracting turpentine from pine trees and processing it in backwoods stills was Florida's second-largest industry - after citrus - before the turn of the century. But it exacted a price on people and the environment unlike any other business.A hard, sticky amber rosin, sometimes called pitch, was made from the trees' turpentine gum, or oleoresin. It was used to preserve ropes and rigging on sailing ships and to caulk the seams between timbers in the ships' hulls.

Abraham Nathaniel made his money dipping turpentine. He didn't make much.Nobody did, except the foremen and the stockholders in out-of-state companies that owned the land and the plentiful longleaf yellow pines.Turpentine camps dotted Central Florida as far back as the 1850s, but the industry took off after the Civil War. By the turn of the century, extracting turpentine from pine trees and processing it in backwoods stills was Florida's second-largest industry - after citrus.The pine pitch was used to preserve ropes and rigging on sailing ships and to caulk the seams between timbers in ships' hulls.

Regarding Thursday's letter to the editor from Forrest Respess about the defeat of Mobility 20/20: In an attempt to paint a dark picture of Central Florida returning to the "land of Tupperware, turpentine, and orange juice," he succeeded in bringing back visions of the happy days of less traffic, no road rage, no homeless, uncrowded schools, very few locked doors, less taxes, cleaner lakes, plenty of drinking water, less hypertension, no gridlock....

At first glance, the scars on the old pines look like signs of lightning strikes or fire damage. A more trained eye recognizes the cat-faced markings as the work of turpentine chippers who sliced gashes to open pine bark and hacked into the trees to draw out the gummy sap. Some trees in the remote Forever Florida nature preserve south of Holopaw still bear the markings at their base from the turpentine workers' tools. Elsewhere in the scrub forest, fragments of terra-cotta pottery once used to collect pine sap can still be found near the bases of some larger trees.

I'm not sure I would know it if I were standing in a custard apple forest, but I know I would be lost. I'm no wilderness adventurer. I leave an extra half-hour early anytime I drive to someplace I've never been, just to make up for my wrong turns. Given that, I know if Osceola County still has a custard apple forest, we should find it and put up a marker. In the historical novel A Land Remembered, Patrick D. Smith's early Florida cattleman Zech MacIvey spends a frightful few days and nights driving a herd through the custard apple forest west of the Kissimmee River as it approaches Lake Okeechobee.

One of the perks of being married to a Naval officer is the opportunity to travel to unusual and exotic ports and experience the food and culture native to foreign countries. So when my husband's ship pulled into port in Athens, Greece, I jumped at the chance to meet the ship and spend some time with my husband in a romantic setting steeped in archaeological wonders. During our visit, we had the good fortune to be introduced to the dashing captain of a Greek shipping magnate's private yacht.

Last year's devastating infestations of Southern pine beetles have gardeners wondering if the pests are going to return. Area foresters expect the beetles to be a problem but a limited threat to trees in home landscapes. Locally, the beetle's favorite food, the loblolly pine, is not a major landscape tree. The more common tall-growing slash pines have some resistance and are usually affected only if the beetles become established in nearby susceptible species. If the Southern pine beetles do return, they are likely to be found in the few remaining pockets of the loblolly pines north of State Road 50. Other pine beetles are, however, a constant threat to local pine trees.

Mary Ellen Calhoun Mason died in 1906. Within a year, her husband, George Mason, who had brought his family to Sanford from the phosphate-mining town of Fort Meade seeking a better life and a better job with the railroad, decided to become his own boss. George Mason had toiled in some of the hardest jobs available during the years when Central Florida was still a remote wilderness to much of the nation. Mason's only son Troy was 10 years old when his father and uncles decided to homestead 160 acres of timberland along the St. Johns River 7 miles west of Crow's Bluff.

The remains of a turpentine-making community forgotten by all but long- time northwest Volusia County residents has been unearthed, and is providing a historical preservation group with relics of a major Florida industry.Members of the Barberville Pioneer Settlement for the Creative Arts said they hope a 10-acre plot of land will yield enough remains that they will be able to start an educational display on the workings of a turpentine camp.The group has preserved other relics from throughout the county, including a company store from another abandoned turpentine camp several miles to the north of the settlement headquarters.

Mary Ellen Calhoun Mason died in 1906. Within a year, her husband, George Mason, who had brought his family to Sanford from the phosphate-mining town of Fort Meade seeking a better life and a better job with the railroad, decided to become his own boss. George Mason had toiled in some of the hardest jobs available during the years when Central Florida was still a remote wilderness to much of the nation. Mason's only son Troy was 10 years old when his father and uncles decided to homestead 160 acres of timberland along the St. Johns River 7 miles west of Crow's Bluff.

George Virgin Mason moved his family to Sanford in 1901 when he went to work in the shops for the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. His son, Troy Jerome Mason, wrote about the family for the Museum of Seminole County History. His early memories of Sanford include fishing along the lakefront. ``Along the lakefront there were many fish houses for cleaning, icing and shipping fish,'' Mason writes. The county's largest commercial fishing businesses were along Lake Monroe. At that time, fishing on lakes Monroe, Jesup and Harney and the St. Johns River brought more money into Seminole County than all other businesses combined, writes historian Arthur Francke Jr. in Early Days of Seminole County.

ROCK HILL, S.C. - A tank exploded outside a paper plant Tuesday, killing two workers. The explosion at the Bowater Inc. plant also injured two others, a spokesman for York County Emergency Management said. The four were welding the tank when turpentine fumes ignited.